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Alumni in Running for Gary Public Art Contest

Photo courtesy of the Legacy Foundation

Downtown Gary will be getting new public art thanks to its inaugural public art competition. Sponsored by the Legacy Foundation, the contest is offering awards ranging from $25,000 to $3,000, and SAIC alumni are included in the list of 15 finalists.

Damon Reed (BFA 1999) and Lauren Pacheco (MA 2015) are both in the running for the competition's top prize, $25,000. They're also in the running to be one of three contestants to win $10,000. Haerim Lee (Post-Bac 2015, MFA 2018) is a finalist, too, in the $3,000 category—awarded to four participants.

The competition, designed to beautify the city through encouraging public art at one of 19 designated locations, showcase several unique visions. One of Pacheco's projects, for example, wants to invite residents to have their surname painted in a font of their choice on the side of a building; another aspires to compile found objects on one to two acres of an abandoned lot and fashion them into art.

Meanwhile, Lee's mural, This Living Portrait, Gary in 1906 and 1968, features a Black man and White man in identical suits to represent the city's changed demographics.

Of the chance of having his artwork heavily featured in Gary, Indiana's redevelopment effort, Reed said to the Northwest Indiana Times, “I want to take Gary’s past—its factories, steel companies—and use that, but give my vision for Gary’s future.”

Chicago, March 13, 2018—The U.S. Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and The University of Chicago (UChicago), today announced new details about the exhibition Dimensions of Citizenship. The exhibition’s curators have commissioned seven architecture practices to explore how citizenship may be defined, constructed, enacted, contested, or expressed in the built environment at seven different spatial scales.

For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers​, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries​, and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate​, and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world—as seen through notable alumni and faculty such as Michelle Grabner, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Hunt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cynthia Rowley, Nick Cave, Jeff Koons, and LeRoy Neiman.